Deep Blue is a garbage shoot 'em up that's often considered one of the worst games on the TurboGrafX-16. It deserves that reputation. But the way it handles damage is unique for the genre. It's the only shmup I know of where you have regenerating health. This only happens when you're not shooting, a mechanic that theoretically could lead to interesting choices like "should I take a risk and keep going for score even though my health is low?" or "Is it worth waiting, or would it actually be safer to take that boss out as fast as possible?" But it doesn't work great here, as you're just constantly bombarded by enemies moving in sin wave patterns, and it's hard to actually avoid them for long. And it's not communicated as well as you'd hope: you don't have a health bar, with your health instead being shown by the color of your fish's eye, and what causes it to recharge isn't obvious just by playing the game. There's one old guide out there where the author thought you healed by mashing the start button (which I guess technically works, since you'd probably take your hand off of the fire button to do that).

Still, ever since I played this, I've been wondering what we'd get if a more competent developer made a shmup with a health mechanic like this. If there's one out there that I missed, let me know.

Super Albatross was the first sports game ever to come out on a CD-ROM, and it sucks shit. Rather than the usual three button press swing mechanic, you hold down the button and release, with more power the longer you hold it. But it's really unclear how much power you're putting in. And I think it's more accurate if you do release the button rather than just keeping it held down, but the feedback is so bad that I honestly can't tell for certain. In story mode, you instantly game over if you fall behind one hole, though it at least does let you continue at the beginning of the match with your last opponent. But due to the awkward, imprecise gameplay, winning usually means lucking out and getting a match where the CPU gets caught in a tree for a few swings.

But it's not all misery. If you're playing this, you're playing it for that story mode. The fully voiced anime cut scenes of the over the top and nonsensical plot are just a delight. It's a good thing there's a cheat code to just watch them so that you don't have to put up with everything else on the disk.

It's called F1 Pilot: You're King of Kings. You first notice something is odd when the game does something unique on the PC Engine: making you choose between sound effects or music like this is an Amiga game or something. The PC Engine has 6 sound channels, which is plenty for both, so I'm baffled as to why this is a thing. It gets worse when you actually start playing. The steering is really unresponsive, and the cornering is just strange. You know how in old racers like this, they simulate going around curves by curving the road in front of you and gradually pushing you to the outside? This game instead will suddenly shove you to the outside like 2 or 3 times during the turn. It makes it hard to stay on the road. And unfortunately, there's so little to the game that it's hard to recommend even to kusoge fans. Like you'll get a couple minutes of "how the hell did they release it like this," but there's so little to this garbage that you'll be bored by the time the first race is over.